msurgeon wrote:
I certainly don't expect DR companies, of which we are one, to offer their expertise for nothing; nor do I seek their free advice in this post. I do expect, however, that a drive manufacturer- in this case Seagate- will address an issue which seems to be plaguing one of their new models without forcing people to pay for Seagate data recovery services for what is, in this case, most likely a 30-second, one-click fix.
First, I can't agree that I've seen any specific Seagate models fail with a single failure mode more than any model from any other manufacturer. They've been mostly pretty reliable for us.
Second, I can only think of a single time that a manufacturer has released firmware utilities to the marketplace to correct a known problem. And it was the Maxtor compatibilities problem (I think w/ nVidia, but I can't remember).
Third, you are assuming that, if there is a problem, that Seagate hasn't provided a fix to other D/R firms. Just because they haven't shared it with YOU doesn't mean they haven't shared it with others.
Insisting that they have engineering staff ready to share data with anyone that presents themselves as a D/R firm probably isn't going to get us very far.